Korean Feminism Reins In the Collective Power of the Internet

An emerging Feminist movement finds power in the collective power of the Internet

Founded on August 6th, 2015, the independent website Megalian.com brands a new type of feminism – one that uses the country’s world-class ICT infrastructure to promote gender equality and to humorously bash misogyny on the Korean web.

The name, currently filed for trademark registration by one of its users, is a neologism combining ‘MERS gallery’, the web forum where the movement was born, and ‘Egalia’, of Gerd Brantenberg‘s satiric novel ‘Egalia’s Daughters‘. Megalian.com operates strictly on an anonymous basis, with all members posting under the same nickname, except for notices regarding server maintenance by the site’s administrators, who nevertheless remain anonymous (As of December 2015, the few interviews conducted with its members or admins have not revealed any personal information).

The collective movement began in June 2015, when women began to ‘mirror’ the misogynic comments made by male members on DCInside.com, a popular web forum. What was conceived as a minor page dedicated to sharing information on MERS-CoV, the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus, turned to a battleground between the sexes. Male users began launching hate speech on two Korean women affected by MERS who, due to miscommunication, did not comply to the South Korean government’s call for quarantine. Women fought back, parroting back male users’ comments by simply replacing the words ‘women’ with ‘men’, a tactic they actively promote as ‘mirroring‘.

Megalia’s members, who call themselves ‘Megalians’, have since created a stir in the Korean media. Opponents call them men-haters and accuse them of fighting hate back with hate – that these women have gone too far. This is precisely the point, Megalians say. To see the misogyny that is today taken as acceptable social behaviour and spat at Korean women every day: to turn it around so men and women alike can witness it in its honest, raw form – discrimination.

At the moment of its conception in August, the site had 170,000 unique visitors (data by similarweb.com). This number has continued to grow, adding another 100K almost every month. The November stats stand at 370,000. About 83% percent of its visitors log in from tech-savvy Korea, while 10% hail from the US, and smaller numbers from Canada, Japan and New Zealand (a portion of users are also based in European nations).

About a quarter of its traffic stems from referrals – most notably from Ilbe.com, a website whose members have been Megalia’s target of criticism and vice versa since the movement began at DCInside.com . Ilbe, a site dedicated to sharing humour whose political stance leans towards the extreme right, has continuously faced accusations from the general Korean population for its largely unmoderated content – much like 4chan in the rest of the world. Its notoriety stems from members’ ad hominem attacks targeting specific groups, such as women and Koreans originating from Jeolla province. Users have been sentenced for using the terms ‘fish cake’ and ‘barbecue meat’ to mock the hundreds of civilians deceased in the 2014 Sewol ferry incident and the 2003 Daegu subway fire.

Megalia’s logo reflects its satiric nature, heavily influenced by the Feminist novel ‘Egalia’s Daughters: A Satire of the Sexes‘ by Norwegian author Gerd Brantenberg. In the influential feminist oeuvre, Brantenberg narrates a world where gender roles are entirely reversed – linguistically (women are called ‘wim’ and men ‘menwim’, making the man the suffix), socially (women are by default given the upper hand at the home and in society due to their power to give birth), and sexually (men are at constant risk of sexual assault; the blame is entirely theirs and not of their assailant). The logo symbolises Korean society’s – notably of men – highly judgemental attitude towards women’s physical appearance and mirrors the obsession with women’s sexuality by mocking the size of South Korean men’s penises – ‘they are just not good enough‘.

The satire and humour culminated in the creation of a Megalian dictionary as well as the parody of a popular Korean comic targeted at young children learning basic classical Chinese characters (all the characters are reinterpretations of the letter 男, which means ‘man’).

Popular Megalian vocabulary and expressions include references to social problems caused by Korean men as well as mirrors of derogatory terms used by men on sites such as Ilbe:

Chanel lipstick: mocks the kimchi girl concept, a derogatory term used by men to refer to women who buy brand goods

Papa: refers to Korean men who’ve had extramarital affairs in South Asian countries and abandoned their spouses once a child was born

Schroedinger’s Korean Man: refers to a study which reported that approximately 58% of of Korean men have purchased sexual services

Dead Older Sister: refers to the selective abortion of female foetuses commonly practiced up until the 1990s

Although men are the main target of Megalian mirroring techniques and retorts, women receive criticism as well. These women – dubbed ‘corseted’ (after the restraining fashion device) or ‘Penis Emeritus’ are, however seen as a product of the male-dominated society, who must break free from the social injustice by individual will (by joining Megalian, of course). It should be noted that almost all Korean women are understood as having undergone a ‘corseted’ phase at some time in their life, as it is a social norm implemented on even the most Feminist children.

The movement doesn’t stop at simply mocking misogyny. It has backed several Feminist campaigns – including the crowdfunding of adverts in Seoul’s public transport system denouncing pornographic ‘hidden cam’ videos; endorsing support for and encouraging individual donations be made to New Political Alliance Democracy politician Jin Sunmee, who is leading a campaign to shut down Soranet, a South Korean porn hub associated with brokering underage prostitution and sharing videos of illegal nature (Jin’s office received a total of 10 million KRW / 9,000€ / 10,000$ in the 24 hours following the upload of a post calling Megalians to donate).

The site is currently working extensively on exposing Soranet, Korea’s biggest pornographic website (over a million users are currently registered) and whose claim to fame lies on its ability to keep avoiding legal consequences by constantly changing domains names and servers, effectively placing it outside the jurisdiction of South Korean law. (You can read more about Soranet and Korean women’s battle against their illegal activities in an upcoming post)

Megalia also played a detrimental role in the 2015 Maxim Korea scandal. In its September 2015 issue, MAXIM Korea’s cover depicts the images of a naked woman’s feet dangling out of a car boot, with the slogan “This is what a real bad man is like. How do you like me now?”. The photoshoot goes on to show the images, most likely of the assumed female victim in the boot, looking up at the assailant, then being dragged in a plastic body bag. The magazine took a defensive stance at the accusations, and only issued an apology after international media and a spokesperson for MAXIM US condemned their actions.

Cover of MAXIM Korea’s September 2015 issue

Other activities Megalian is collectively responsible for include:

September: Successfully shutting down the sale of ‘hidden cam’ type devices on Ticketmonster (Tmon), a Korean e-commerce platform (unrelated to the ticket sales site ticketmonster.com). Following dozens of calls of complaint from Megalians, Tmon stopped sales and issued an official apology. Wemakeprice.com, which sold similar products also retracted sales but have not published an apology.

September: Donated over 6 million KRW (4,700€/5,100$) to Aeranwon, an NGO which helps single mothers

September: Contacted Hanshin University’s student council regarding a series of banners containing misogynic slogans. The council subsequently issued an official apology and removed all banners

October: Stopped sale of high-concentrate hydrochloric acid on 11st.co.kr by filing complaint to the Ministry of Environment. Hydrochloric and sulphuric acid have been used as weapons in hate crimes committed by men on women

As of December 25th, the site is running several funding and media campaigns. A YouTube channel dedicated to providing information on hate crimes in Korea uploads videos with English, French, Japanese, Mandarin, and Spanish subtitles.

However, the site is not without trouble. In early December, a debate regarding whether or not the site should support gay men’s rights (the site is supportive of female members of the queer community). Members argued that should not be exempt from criticism, as they are also part of the Korean male community which they target for mirroring. The administrators ruled that members should not use derogatory satiric terms to refer to gay men, which resulted in a massive exodus. Womad, an alternative to Megalian.com was proposed, but as of December 25th, no site has been launched and its Daum forum has been made private [Update July 22nd, 2016: Still no website; Daum forum running].

Since the December exodus, several sites pretending to be an alternative to Megalian.com have popped up, taking advantage of the confusion and luring Megalians to join or to visit them. However, few Megalians have actually joined them, as they were warned beforehand on the forums.

Men, mostly from rival site Ilbe, have also been vandalising and lurking on Megalia, a site dominated by female users (including transgender and transsexual women). As Megalia operates on a strict anonymity basis and insists on an easy-to-join-and-leave policy, there is no way to block users based on any information. Korean web portals such as Naver and Daum require users to provide their national identity number (replaced with Web ID in 2014), which allows admins and moderators of forums to restrict membership based on age and/or gender – but take away any chance at anonymity.

This anonymity is both Megalia’s advantage and drawback, since it guarantees full freedom of speech to members while diminishing the ease of blocking users. A few members have been blocked through IP tracking, however, in general, the admins do not moderate the posts and only issue warnings if several reports have been filed against it.

Since December 2015, administrators and financial backers of the website have continuously received criticism on their lack of transparency, but no official statement has been released.

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Internationally lost since 2000, Emily was born in Seoul, raised in India, and has been living and studying in France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands since 2014. A translator and interpreter by profession, she enjoys talking and debating just about anything.

86 Comments

I’ve stumbled upon your blog and after reading a couple of articles I’m now completely smitten. Not only does your blog provide a great insight into Korean society, the articles read like a novel too. I’m subscribing and looking forward to upcoming articles. Also, if you still live in Belgium and happen to be somewhere near Antwerp, I’d love to buy you a cup of coffee and listen to your thoughts on these topics as well as your experiences abroad. – Gisele x

Oh, I also wanted to ask you something regarding the article. You mentioned that the Ilbe community targets specific groups, such as Koreans originating from Jeolla province. What distinguishes Korean from Jeolla province from the rest of Korea? And what warrants attacks against them according to Ilbe users?

Just an excuse to antagonise and look down on others, as I see it. North and South Jeolla provinces were overlooked in most of modern Korean history. The soil there is extremely fertile and it is famous for haute cuisine, but were left out in the industrialisation process, so the region is quite poor now. Even today, high-speed train connections are limited and few infrastructural developments have been made compared to the other provinces. Few Jeolla people made it in the social hierarchy and there have been massive accusations of Jeolla people being communists when South Korea was under dictatorships (Being a communist was a crime and people were severely punished as they were seen to be pro-North Korea).
In my opinion, the only possible way to tell people from Jeolla province or any other region is by dialects (physical differences are quite small) – but many people, especially the younger ones speak the standard Seoul dialect fluently too! Besides, the Jeolla dialect has much less distinctive intonation compared to the other regions and assimilates easily with standard Korean.
As for Ilbe – most of its users are ultra right-wing who are nostalgic about the 60s to the 80s, during which dictators Park and Chun pushed anti-Jeolla agendae. For instance Chun ordered the 1980 massacre in Gwangu (one of the biggest cities in Jeolla province) against civilians demanding democracy under his regime).
Ilbe users also, logically, dislike former presidents Kim and Roh, who were elected in the 2000s and more left-wing (as opposed to the right-wing governments that are the norm in Korea) They were both from Jeolla province.

There’s a lot of background information that I’m missing, but I’m getting the gist of the issue, thanks for explaining. My dislike for that Ilbe community increases every time I read about them. The comparison with 4chan seems very apt, which is why I assumed most Ilbe users would be young, uninformed males. You mentioned they were nostalgic about the 60s and 80s however, am I completely misjudging the demographic, or are these indeed young fanatics who sympathise with dictators they’ve only read about in their history books?

Hey Gisele! This is really strange, I replied to you weeks ago on my phone – guess that’s how it goes on Mobile.
It puzzles me as well, those young conservatives fantasising about a time they don’t know anything about – like much of the Internet, Ilbe is dominated by the younger generations. And in particular, younger generations with little money, and who turn to the cheap entertainment and socialising easily available on the Korean web world. Otherwise, I’d say it’s a part of the “rise of the Right” going on everywhere here in Europe as well – bad economy equals people wanting a return to a time where it was better economically, regardless of social values!

Thanks for the post. An article about this, related to a backlash against webtoon writers, came across my desk at The Korea Times today and there is not enough good information about Megalian, and feminist issues in general, in English. Thanks.

Hi Dob-mab. Thank you for your comment – this blog is open to comments, and I approve all as long as they don’t contain foul language or are adverts. I get spammed with tens of adverts every day so I now use the “Approve” setting.
I’m not aware of Megalia being charged with murder or defamation – would you care to elaborate? Are there some news articles covering this?
I understand Megalia follows a radical form of feminism. I covered their history here because it is the first online Korean feminist movement to appear widely in the general Korean media and I think that deserves to be shared with the rest of the world.
Also, sorry but I don’t quite understand your last comment: “Feminism wanna gender equality”. What do you mean by this?

Considering that Megalia mirrors attacks on women, they have made what seem to be satirical posters accusing themselves of literally being female nazis. Given that Naziism and its imagery isn’t as taboo or well understood in Korea as it is in the West, this shouldn’t be the cause for alarm a westerner might perceive it to be.

Wasn’t this the website which advocated for male child pornography, male genital mutilation, aborting male children, and supporting the Korean war because men died in it? Or did I just read the wrong stuff?

Above all, the T-shirt funding is not related Megalia. That shirt project supports Megallia4 facebook page. It seems similar with megalian but Megalia 4 is really moderate feminism site. There’s nothing wrong with it.
But feminists supported way over that project’s target figure. So promoter decided to use rest of fund for megalian plaintiff and sexual violence victim.

This became important problem that they support megalian user. Cause they considered evil group.(But they didn’t hurt anyone in real. but they hurted korean men’s feelings.)

And This is what supported megalian’s case.
Website Megalia is mirroring korean misogyny instance. A megalia user reversed paedophile’s writing. And someone released the identity of her, so many people insulted her. So she sued him/her. (Many korean know that she was sued. And they keep introduce megalia is criminal group. But they didn’t commit any crime. Some writing was criminal, but nothing happened in real. And many of it was reversed writing.) It was chosen to fund.

The important things are
1. Not all fund used for supporting Megalian.
2. All donator didn’t support that T-shirt project for support Megalia. Cause that dicision(support megalian accusation) is decided almost end of funding. They did it for feminism and megallia 4 facebook page.
3. Many Korean men are dude.

Above all, the T-shirt funding is not related Megalia. That shirt project supports Megallia4 facebook page. It seems similar with megalian but Megalia 4 is really moderate feminism site. There’s nothing wrong with it.
But feminists supported way over that project’s target figure. So promoter decided to use rest of fund for megalian plaintiff and sexual violence victim.

This became important problem that they support megalian user. Cause they considered evil group.(But they didn’t hurt anyone in real. but they hurted korean men’s feelings.)

And This is what supported megalian’s case.
Website Megalia is mirroring korean misogyny instance. A megalia user reversed paedophile’s writing. And someone released the identity of her, so many people insulted her. So she sued him/her. (Many korean know that she was sued. And they keep introduce megalia is criminal group. But they didn’t commit any crime. Some writing was criminal, but nothing happened in real. And many of it was reversed writing.) It was chosen to fund.

The important things are
1. Not all fund used for supporting Megalian.
2. All donator didn’t support that T-shirt project for support Megalia. Cause that dicision(support megalian accusation) is decided almost end of funding. They did it for feminism and megallia 4 facebook page.
3. Many Korean men are dude.

Hello Emily thanks for the great article. I love it and I can see you have such a deep insight of korean internet society. I just want to let you know this article was shared by Korean Feminists and this going to lure some random Korean men who want to demonize Megalia.com. they claim the Megalia movement is not feminism but it is a selfish gender chauvinism, and they believe megalia.com has commited crimes based on some “mirroring” posts in the site which were just parody writings of the hate crimes against women which I believe to be very typical misogynist’s acts.

Hi Helen! I’m glad to hear my article has been shared by Korean feminists!
I have already been getting some traffic from DCinside, but I was expecting this to happen sooner or later on my blog.
I’ve had a few people claim various crimes committed by Megalia, including murder, but so far haven’t gotten any follow-ups or evidence (I think the Korean media would have covered that).

Hi Helen! I have to approve all the comments in order for them to show up – I get too many ads, plus since a few weeks people who claim to be Korean men have been leaving a bunch of incomprehensible/rude comments as well.

Hello,
I have no intention of being rude or anything but if you really think Megallian is just a satirical-feminist website, I can assure you know nothing about it. I’m guessing you are not a Korean, so I can tell you this as a Korean. In our country, there are two infamously well-known websites and one of them is Megallian (another one is Ilbe, an extreme right-wing website that praises dictatorship happened to Korea some decades ago). You see, Megallian is not considered a normal Feminist website in our country. I myself supports Feminism(aka Gender Equality), but what Megallian wants is not equality; they want women to be above men. They are not being satirical, they truly hate men. They have done countless crimes against men which supports this fact.

Users “Netizenception” and “Jay H” keep linking their blog posts in comments, which I will not approve as their website only has three sections: Blog, Translation Request and Free Lawyer Finder. I do not approve comments from websites which promote paid services.

Thanks for explaining why you blocked my comments, at least. I started my blog only a couple of days ago. Obviously, there is not much content yet but those two articles are directly relevant to your article. They are lengthy with many images as you may know if you checked them out. No better way than simply posting the links to add information here.

When I told my friend about my plan to open a blog, he asked me to add a banner for his “Free Lawyer Finder” website (For the record, it is FREE as it says FREE). Without much thought, I put a temporary button on the menu of my blog for him. Then I realized it makes my blog look very sketchy, which has already affected you here. There, I already removed the ad button. Now I guess you have no reason to block my comments unless….who knows. I could simply ignore your blog and move on, but I don’t like to be treated like some sort of scammer when I just cited your blog post and put a good amount of time and effort to translate lengthy articles partly to show you and others here because I don’t see that many articulate and intelligent refutations against Megalia in this comment section. It is your blog anyway.

This article reads like a puff peice. You include a lot, but leave out a lot of the more heinous acts they’ve committed, as well as the pedophilic, rapist, sexist, racist, and offensive things that are posted on Megalia almost every day. Not even mentioning those, and then not even making any reference to at least *some* of their bigger controversies is the most disingenuous thing I have ever read, especially when this information is available in English, and that increases tenfold if you can read Korean.

This group is very much a hate group. Where 4chan had /b/ and /pol, where your ire is drawn, it also has 58 boards that range from anime to photography to lesbian, gay, bi, and transgender issues. 95% of 4chans boards operate outside of politics. The biggest ‘threats’ from 4chan was one guy posting a shooting threat and one guy posting a bomb threat, otherwise, they are an uncollected group online. Megalia on the other hand often acts offline in groups of 80 or more collected people who often vandalize property, trespass, and protest.

Your failure to mention any of these easily research able things, and a quick mention of ‘4chan’ without any qualifying remarks honestly leaves me to believe you only mentioned it in some 2007 era slander (4chan is a very different and yet same beast at the same time) to make people think ‘wow, megalians enemies = 4chan, so they’re loser men! Wow! So if 4chan = bad and 4chan dislike Megalia then Megalia = good! Thanks so much for this puff peice on something I don’t understand or want to research myself whatsoever with any real understanding or knowledge of the nuances of Korean society! Thanks so much!’

Terrible article. I’m willing to provide receipts, as well as personal translations (I doubt you will accept them for being ‘biased’, but then again my post was calling out your unreasearched, Unannotated article itself, so burden of proof is really on you first to source this article itself. I’d especially like to know [who] is saying some of these things, and some receipts for other things) of anything I mentioned in my comment. I really am. You can especially contact me via email instead of slandering me in the comments, which would be really nice if we can avoid. I can easily send you plenty of personal translations, links (from various Korean news outlets and blogs, if you accept megalian blog posts as ‘proof’ of things then I have plenty of things from other blogs and even their OWN blog for you!)

It’s not so much what the entertainment site says (besides its actually a news site for you Korean news and various other things like that) it’s the. Actual documented proof that the website has that is problematic above other things

Actual news sites are sources like the BBC, Reuters, AFP, who have actual trained journalists with a work ethic. Wikis also don’t count as “documented proof”, unless they have academic or journalistic backup from sources such as the aforementioned. Sorry but I don’t trust your “actual news site”.

I’ve approved a comment from “Jason” containing links, but haven’t been able to open the 2nd & 3rd links to archive.is. To my knowledge Megalia has not been accused of physically harming anyone, female or male. Because then we’d see it on the 9 o’clock news.

I am not showing this for what is written also, but what is SHOWN, I am also showing you things Megalian has personally said on their website through picture proof. I don’t believe placing blood stains, even if they are fake like that quantify as something rational, in fact that is borderline harrasment.

“I have no love for ilbe, they are site that should disappear, but you can’t just shove off what has been shown.”

Sure I can.

“Who said anything about feminist, Megalian isn’t”

Yes they are. You don’t get to decide what other people believe.

““my knowledge Megalia has not been accused of physically harming anyone, female or male” except they have proclaimed and accused that they have.”

Then it should be no trouble to find police reports about these incidents of harm. Do you think of feminists were going around physically harming men, that men would turn a blind eye and not jump on that information right away? Why are these reports so conspicuously absent?

“Sure I can.”
That’s fine, good luck dismissing actual photographic evidence
“Yes they are. You don’t get to decide what other people believe”
You’re right I thought they violate major tenants of feminism that is shown through different texts my bad.

“Then it should be no trouble to find police reports about these incidents of harm. Do you think of feminists were going around physically harming men, that men would turn a blind eye and not jump on that information right away? Why are these reports so conspicuously absent?”

Uh just because nothing was reported doesn’t mean i crime didnt happen, they have on multiple occasions used death threats, illegal photographs,
Promoted pedopholia, used hate speech against other minority groups, and bordeline harrsed people with hanging up fake (hopefully) blood tampons.

I think we’ve had enough circular discussion. You don’t seem to want to supply any hard evidence for your arguments. Also, photographic evidence refers to photos from an actual crime scene, not screencaps from unverified web sources.
For the last time, please supply some evidence to support your logic, keeping in mind Megalia’s tactic is “mirorring”, as I have written in this post.

“I’m afraid it’s not photographic evidence of a crime. Screen captures by a misogunits group aren’t very convincing”
Fine look at my othe links.

“That’s actually quite convincing evidence that the crime didn’t happen. Since when are the police and media in the habit of ignoring crimes by “radical feminists”
That first sentence does not make any sense and second police won’t file a crime if no charges has been brought up, they will dismiss it.

“No, you’re talking about satirical words on the internet again, not actual crimes.”
In the case of men, you are right, on the case of children, lgbtq, illegal photos and borderline harrasment contribute to cyber bullying and child porn, crimes.

Here, a woman (a faculty member at an elementary school no less) explains, in exceptionally vulgar language, how she has sexual fantasies about the genitalia of young boys who are still clean/pure. (I assume she means that they have yet to grow up and become men.)

One person disliked the post, and I suspect it’s the same person who wrote the comment, “*expletive* is this supposed to be mirroring? *expletive* filthy”

Of the two other comments, one commentor describes her hatred for Korean male genitalia, and a preference for the “chocolate” genitalia of black kids.

If you check other posts, the average number of likes is around 5. This one received 10, and one dislike.

So while this post received twice as many likes as the average post, only one person was sane enough to point out just how despicable this human being is.

You can draw your own conclusions about what kind of community this is.

Im a westerner and from reading around this group i find it hard to believe anyone, anyone with any sense at least, could support this group. The members concern themselves with violence, inaccurate targeting and hatred. For a man to have criticized the plastic surgery epidemic in south korea to have his house destroyed, his family threatened and then harrassed non-stop is just incoherent and impermissible. Please research more thoroughly before future blog posts.

Hi Elisha, please share evidence (news article, press release from police) regarding this man who “had his house destroyed”. I haven’t found any substantiated claims as such. Surely you have a source I don’t know of.

Thank you for writing this article, I’m actually very surprised that a group like this exists in S. Korea. There seems to be people that like to exaggerate some of the things Megalians do based on reading the comments, and in another article I read. It gets annoying when people frame feminists as physically violent murderers, when there hasn’t been any real evidence of it. And this happens a lot even among the more moderate feminists.

It’s a fairly new movement, and I’m keeping an eye on its developments – it’s meaningful enough in that feminism has come into public debate, in my opinion. I’ve had quite a few people come on here and claim that Megalians have burned a man’s house down, committed sexual crimes, even murder, but they’ve all magically disappeared when I asked them to come back with hard evidence (i.e. NOT an online thread). I guess women getting angry makes people who are used to seeing them as docile uncomfortable, both men and women! (Great comic on this issue at: http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/12/tone-policing-and-privilege/)

Hi, thanks for writing this article. I know you wrote this article just around a year ago, but I’m just wondering if you can provide any citation of reliable sources, news or an article. I was only able to find pingback from the other one. I just want to know how and where you got these information.

About

Internationally lost since 2000, Emily was born in Seoul, raised in India, and has been living and studying in France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands since 2014. A translator and interpreter by profession, she enjoys talking and debating just about anything.